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Cream St. Germain Au Lait D'Amande
Scald, peel and thoroughly pound a quarter pound almonds, place in a saucepan with a half pint milk and boil for thirty minutes. Strain through a cheesecloth into the st. Germain, mix well, boil for five minutes, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
This is a finishing step rather than a whole soup: it assumes you already have a purée St. Germain (green pea soup) on the stove, and enriches it with homemade almond milk. Everything depends on having that base ready before you start.
- The missing half of the recipe"The st. Germain" is a separate entry: a green pea soup. The quantity of it needed here is not stated, and the yield depends entirely on how much of that base you have.
- A quarter pound of almondsThat is a scant cup of blanched almonds. Scalding and peeling means pouring boiling water over them, standing a minute, then slipping off the skins so the finished soup stays pale.
- Pounding, and the food processorA mortar and pestle was the usual tool for this. A food processor or blender does the same work in a minute, but grind the almonds dry first, then add the milk, or you get coarse fragments that never give up their flavor.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. Thirty minutes of open boiling will reduce it noticeably and risks scorching the almond solids at the bottom; keep it at a bare simmer, stir, and top up with a little more milk if it tightens too far.
- StrainingCheesecloth, wrung hard, extracts far more than a sieve. Twist the bundle and squeeze until the ground almonds are nearly dry, then discard them.
- The last five minutesOnce the almond milk goes into the pea purée, five minutes at a gentle simmer is enough to marry them. A hard boil will dull the green color and, if the base has been finished with cream or egg, can curdle it.
- SeasoningThe original leaves it to the base soup. Taste after the almond milk goes in; you may find it needs the salt corrected, and a pinch of sugar can help if the peas were dried.
Potage St. Germain is the classic French green pea soup, named for Saint-Germain-en-Laye west of Paris, whose market gardens were long associated with early peas; the name is generally traced to that connection rather than to any single cook. Almond milk in a savory soup looks like a modern substitution but was the standard substitute for dairy cream in European kitchens: ground almonds boiled with water or milk were a standard thickener and enricher in medieval and Renaissance cookery, valued because they kept in hot weather and were permitted on fast days when cream was not. The designation au lait d'amande marks the soup as a dressed-up version of an everyday purée.